Given that Beyonce Knowles-Carter both had two musical partners in Destiny’s Child—Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams—before she went out on her own as a solo act, and a younger sister, Solange Knowles, who is also a musician, it’s fascinating to hear Rowland sing about the difficulties of living in Knowles-Carter’s orbit in “Dirty Laundry.” What makes the song particularly interesting though is the way it chronicles the ups and downs of Rowland’s relationship with Knowles-Carter as it tracks with what Rowland says was an abusive relationship with an unnamed man, during which Knowles-Carter’s fame and success were both causes for resentment, a lifeline for Rowland, and something her ex-boyfriend invoked as part of his efforts to isolate her and dominate her affections. “He hittin the window like it was me, until it shattered / He pulled me out, he said, “Don’t nobody love you but me / Not your mama, not your daddy and especially not Bey” / He turned me against my sister,” Rowland sings on the track, in which she also describes feeling some relief that Knowles-Carter’s fame eclipsed hers, and describes a call from Knowles-Carter that encouraged her to leave the man who was abusing her:

Given Knowles-Carter’s obsessive curation of her own image, “Dirty Laundry” may be the most genuinely revealing look at her behavior and artistic circle in years. It certainly tells us more about Knowles-Carter than Beyonce: Life Is But A Dream, the documentary she co-directed and for which she provided much of the archival footage, that aired on HBO earlier this spring. Knowing that Knowles-Carter remains personally close to at least one member of Destiny’s Child cuts through the tabloid rumors about feuds and reunions. And knowing that Rowland survived an abusive relationship lends context to her efforts to establish herself as an artist independent of both the musical legacy of Destiny’s Child and Knowles-Carter’s considerable shadow.

In an age of hyper-produced pop stars, and given the myth that trauma creates great art, it’s easy to forget how artistic confidence and personal stability can be related. Knowles-Carter fired her father Matthew as her manager, and appears to have had a falling-out with him, but she’s also in a long-term, stable relationship with a partner, Jay-Z, who appears supportive of her career and her family. Solange Knowles, who’s found professional success by hopping genres so she isn’t in competition with her sister, finding a musical style that matches her vocal capabilities and her strengths as a small-club performer, married and had her first child at 17, moved to Idaho with her husband, and divorced shortly thereafter. Rowland, who for a time split her efforts pursuing a career in acting while continuing to make music, also appears to have had personal difficulties that weren’t widely known until now. Or, as she puts it on “Dirty Laundry,” “I swear y’all don’t know the half of this industry.”

The Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism’s annual survey of how women are represented in the 100 top-grossing movies from the previous year is out, and much has been made of the study’s finding that the percentage of female characters has declined to a five-year low, from 29.9 percent in 2007 to 28.4 percent in 2012. But it’s not just notable that the number of female characters with speaking parts has fallen to a low—after all, there were better years in between 2007 and 2012. The survey says a lot about what kinds of women successful movies include, and what those movies think women are for. My colleague Adam Peck put together a graphic representation of some of the most revealing statistics in the study:

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(Credit: Getty Images)

Chris Kluwe, the National Football League punter who has been an outspoken advocate for LGBT equality both inside and outside sports, announced Thursday that he will sign a one-year contract with the Oakland Raiders. Kluwe played the previous eight seasons for the Minnesota Vikings before being cut earlier this month after the Vikings selected a punter in the 5th round of April’s NFL Draft.

Kluwe, incidentally, is moving from one state that just passed marriage equality (Minnesota) to one where same-sex marriage is still illegal (California), and he told fellow LGBT ally Brendon Ayanbadejo that he will remain an advocate for LGBT rights when he joins the Raiders, Ayanbadejo wrote on FOXSports.com:

Kluwe is known for his mind and mouth, as well as his leg. He is a vocal advocate of equality in sports (and life), and says he will continue to speak for what he believes.

“I’m still going to be myself socially and continue to tweet and interact with my fans,” Kluwe said.

Kluwe and Ayanbadejo were both released by their teams this spring, immediately fueling speculation around the sports world that their advocacy had been a factor in the teams’ decisions. Even Minnesota Gov. Mark Dayton (D) weighed in when Kluwe was cut, saying, “Yeah, I don’t feel good about it,” an implication that Kluwe’s outspokenness played a role in his release. Others raised similar questions when the Baltimore Ravens released Ayanbadejo.

Though Ayanbadejo remains unsigned, Kluwe’s new contract should put those concerns to rest. The reality is that the release of both players looked more like business decisions — Kluwe was due $1.45 million in 2013, nearly $1 million more than the Vikings will pay his rookie replacement. Ayanbadejo, meanwhile, was an aging 36-year-old linebacker who primarily played special teams, and considering that the Ravens handed out a record contract to quarterback Joe Flacco, his $940,000 salary at an easy-to-replace position made him expendable (he was hardly the only prominent Raven to fall victim to cost-cutting this offseason).

And as as Cyd Zeigler argued at OutSports when the Vikings cut Kluwe, immediate speculation without evidence that advocacy played a role in their releases can be counterproductive to the cause they are pushing, Ayanbadejo, Kluwe, and other players have fought to make the NFL a more open and inclusive place both for advocates of LGBT rights and for gay players. But painting football as a place where those voices still aren’t welcome, where speaking out carries the penalty of losing one’s job, only encourages allies to remain quiet and gay players to stay in the closet. And it ignores the progress the league as made. Despite hiccups along the way, the NFL has indeed become a more open place: not only are Kluwe and Ayanbadejo speaking out, but so are both NFL Players Association president Dominque Foxworth and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, and the league has strengthened its efforts to rid the game of discrimination and homophobia.

If evidence existed that Kluwe and Ayanbadejo’s advocacy played a role in either situation, it should be publicized, shamed, and subject to the league’s non-discrimination policy. It’s far more likely, though, that Kluwe and Ayanbadejo were cut because football, as Zeigler explained, “is a numbers game.” Making legitimate business decisions doesn’t make a football team discriminatory, and treating legitimate business decisions as discriminatory only ensures that football will remain in the shadows of tolerance for far longer than it should.

This post discusses plot points from Star Trek Into Darkness in some detail.

Starships and Klingons and tribbles, oh my! I’d expected that Star Trek Into Darkness, J.J. Abrams’ follow-up to his 2009 alternate-timeline reboot of the venerable franchise, with returning writers Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, could have been any one of a number of things: a confident coming-of-age for Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), a return to the tradition of space exploration that defined the original show and movies, with some unintended consequences thrown in to accomodate the tastes of modern action audiences, and even continuation of the sci-fi screwball romance between Spock (Zachary Quinto) and Uhura (Zoe Saldana). What I didn’t anticipate is that as a blockbuster, Star Trek Into Darkness would be impressively generic, but that in a summer when drone strikes and extrajudicial killings appear to have been on many screenwriters and directors minds’, it would do one of the clearest (if not deep) jobs of outlining the debates over the American drone program for a mass audience.

When we meet up with the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise again, they’re on a planet inhabited by a primitive species that’s about to be destroyed by a volcano. Spock, in a potential violation of the mission directive to explore the world, uses cold fusion to stop the explosion, but not without endangering his own life in a way that prompts Kirk to come to his rescue by means that blow the Prime Directive not to speed up that species’ technological development quite literally out of the water, or without hurting Uhura, now firmly established as Spock’s girlfriend. Their actions, and Kirk’s filing of a fudged report of them while Spock tells the truth, get Kirk demoted to First Officer under Christopher Pike, who returns to command of the Enterprise, and Spock reassigned to the U.S.S. Bradbury. But their split it short-lived after a man identified as Starfleet officer John Harrison induces a fellow member of Starfleet to bomb what appears to be an archive, an attack that turns out to be a trap to lure Starfleet’s top commanders to a single for a strategy session. When Harrison attacks that session from the air, killing Pike and other high-ranking Starfleet commanders, Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) gives Kirk back his ship and permission to go after Harrison, who turns out to be rather more than he seems.

The details of what how they do so are remarkably noisy and remarkably forgettable. But the nature of Marcus’s commission to Kirk and company provokes the movie’s strongest throughline and most clearly-developed ideas. The question in Star Trek Into Darkness is whether or not Kirk should follow strategic detail of Marcus’s orders to, using new and advanced torpedoes, “park on the edge of Klingon space, you fire, you take him out, and you haul ass,” or comply with Starfleet rules and make sure that Harrison receives a fair trial back on earth. That Star Trek Into Darkness presents that choice at all, outlining the debate in very similar terms to the arguments about the use of drone strikes to carry out extrajudicial killings of accused terrorists outside of the United States, differentiates it from the other pop culture explorations the subject, which has become a strikingly common feature of movies and television this year, including Iron Man 3 and Fox procedural Bones.
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The bridge is yours.

-Teal Sherer is Kickstarting a second season of the very funny My Gimpy Life.

-This is your brain on television.

-The American Civil Liberties Union wants Modern Family‘s Mitch and Cam to get married.

-Shakira’s heading out ofThe Voice.

-If you have $10,500, you can have a Night’s Watch Watch.

I try not to get overly invested in any of the many, many shows the broadcast networks are frantically trying to pitch to advertisers, television critics, and ultimately to audience during upfronts week every year, because so many of them will turn out to be dreck, to be abused by the networks that currently claim to love them by means of scheduling shenanigans, or to simply fail to connect with mass audiences. But every year, hope flares up again about one or two of the trailers I’m seeing, and this year, I’m excited about Super Fun Night, Wilson’s comedy for ABC, which looks like it could be one of the more entertaining and honest portrayals of nerdy girls out there, because it seems like it will use their awkwardness not to make fun of them, but to reveal some of the weirdness of social convention:

If the characters act weird while trying to get into a club, it’s partially because standing in a line for hours to go to a place where there is music and alcohol, and where a strange set of rules governs who gets in and who doesn’t, is actually a strange, not incredibly fun experience. If Rebel Wilson underwear with light-up hearts on it to impress a guy she’s supposed to meet, maybe it’s because the rules governing what counts as sexy female attire are actually sort of strange. And maybe if you spend some weekend nights in with your friends or roommates, it’s because nights in are fun not only for freakish losers, but for actual humans.

Female-created comedies in recent years have tended to go in one of two directions, aiming squarely for raunch like Whitney or 2 Broke Girls, or making their characters odd in some way. The Mindy Project‘s Mindy Lahiri is hilariously self-absorbed about everything except her hypercompetence as an OB/GYN, while New Girl‘s Jessica Day is squeamish about sex and whimsical in ways that can be socially inappropriate. I’m sort of curious to see what happens when women from the second character try to become the sort of people who can capably participate in the first. I just hope that Super Fun Night gives its female characters compelling reasons to stay in, as well as to start going out.

National Review roving correspondent Kevin Williamson is in the process of congratulating himself for, in response to having been repeatedly interrupted by a phone-using patron at the theater last night, grabbing her phone, hurling it away from her, and getting himself slapped and ejected:

The lady seated to my immediate right (very close quarters on bench seating) was fairly insistent about using her phone. I asked her to turn it off. She answered: “So don’t look.” I asked her whether I had missed something during the very pointed announcements to please turn off your phones, perhaps a special exemption granted for her. She suggested that I should mind my own business.

So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

In a civilized world, I would have received a commendation of some sort. To the theater-going public of New York — nay, the the world – I say: “You’re welcome.”

Let’s leave aside the facts that making grand statement’s like Williamson’s is almost certainly more disruptive both to fellow patrons and to the actors on stage than the use of a cell phone in the audience, and that sending someone else’s phone across the theater at great speed is a much more efficient way to make a martyr of said terribly rude person than to strike a blow for civility. Williamson is right on two points: the use of cell phones in live performances in particular is inexcusably rude, and theaters need to do much more to protect both audiences and performers from interruption.

Theaters tend towards politeness for the most part, asking people to turn off their phones, cameras, tablets, etc., rather than telling people directly that device use will get them automatically ejected and even banned, or, less coercively, using what’s been found to be a psychologically effective tactic of telling audiences what percentage of their peers turn off their phones. But theaters are private establishments that are allowed to set their own rules, and have plenty of good grounds to do so, including the safety of performers who could be distracted by a bright cell phone screen in the audience, and the pleasure of the vast majority of patrons who come to shows hoping to be uninterrupted. And it would be nice to see them be far more proactive to set clear ground rules, to have ushers monitor the house from the back and proactively warn and then eject patrons who use their phones, and even to consider bans on people who don’t comply with stated rules. Such a policy might risk losing some business, but a theatergoer who’s spending all night on the phone should be judged a less valuable customer than one who pays attention.

Or theaters could take a different approach and circumvent the problem of phones in the seats altogether. I attend critics’ screenings of films all the time where the people running the screenings require people attending the film to check their cell phones in paper bags, mostly as an anti-piracy measure. It seems to work just fine, and people seem to submit without much hassle. Theaters for staged plays have two advantages on movie theaters: they already have coat checks, for the most part, and they’re dealing with far fewer performances, so handling the volume of checked phones, whether patrons have to put them in lockers or hand them over directly, shouldn’t be impossible. If the slight inconvenience protects well-intentioned patrons from both cell phone use and the squabbles over it, it’s well worth it.